Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “No.”

  Simon held me in his gaze. He had eyes like Hadrian’s, bottomless and deep-socketed, and the beard was like Hadrian’s too, and his restless way of moving. Simon could intimidate people with that burning energy and those deep-set eyes, but I’d learned to lie under Hadrian’s gaze, and I stared back until my old friend shrugged.

  “I told you it would pass.”

  “You did,” I said. “Join me at the bathhouse tomorrow to spar?”

  “No, I’ve my own affairs to handle.” I didn’t know what those affairs were. Simon was no patriarch to laze in the courtyard with scrolls and grandchildren.

  I didn’t ask. I should have.

  It was after he’d departed that I heard that the Emperor was to visit Judaea. Perhaps next year, maybe the one after that. “After he travels through Parthia.”

  “Corrupt boy-fucker,” someone snickered from behind me, and I stood up and swung. God knows I’d called Hadrian worse, and to his face—but I swung my fists in his defense anyway, or maybe Antinous’s defense, and I broke a man’s jaw and his hand before the widow I employed managed to get her hissing imprecations through my rage. “It’s your shop,” she said, eyeing me with what I realized was dislike. “But you’ll never turn a profit if you beat the customers!”

  I looked at the drinkers sitting at my tables. Two or three retired legionaries dicing in a corner, but the rest were men of Judaea, hard-eyed and hostile as they looked at me. I turned and slouched out, and behind I heard a soft, contemptuous mutter. “Romans and their fists!” I could have turned and started swinging again, but if I came home with skinned knuckles one more time, Mirah would just look at me in disappointment—or worse yet, indulgence. Or she wouldn’t notice at all, because she was wrapped in her prayers. So I sat down in the street outside with my back to a wall, stinging hands dangling useless between my knees. I couldn’t go home because my wife would be singing softly throughout the house, and the girls would be chattering in the Aramaic they spoke more than they spoke Latin. All three of them so happy, all of them home.

  And I was so wretchedly lonely I sometimes thought it would kill me.

  CHAPTER 10

  ANNIA

  A.D. 128, Spring

  Rome

  “I look ridiculous,” Marcus said.

  Annia propelled him along the passage. “Yes.”

  “That’s all I am to you. A joke in a silly costume!”

  “Just make my mother laugh, Marcus? She’s hardly so much as smiled yet. I thought maybe . . .” A gesture at Marcus’s ceremonial garb, which he’d donned for his first performance as one of the Salii. The leaping priests of Mars were supposed to be warriors of old, and the antique breastplate and the red cloak weren’t so bad, but the spiked helmet looked like a phallus, and the tunic was bloused and flounced and embroidered within an inch of its life. “Just make my mother laugh, and I’ll owe you a boon.” Any boon would be worth a smile from her mother, who was still recovering from childbed. The twins had come so hard, and the fever afterward had hit so swiftly.

  She’s well now, Annia thought, towing Marcus along again. I just have to make her happy.

  Annia’s mother did smile just a little as they came into her chamber and Marcus doffed his spiked headdress. “What have we here?” she exclaimed. “A leaping priest on the verge of his debut?”

  “It’s a very great honor, my grandfather tells me,” Marcus sighed. “But nobody understands the ritual. Ovid wrote about it, and even he didn’t understand it.”

  Annia rejoiced then, because her mother laughed outright. “Will you practice it for us, nevertheless? If I’m not to be at the festival—”

  Marcus seized a tasseled cushion and struck a pose. “Imagine this is a shield fallen from the heavens during the reign of Numa Pompilius—”

  “I’ll take the baby so you can clap,” Annia volunteered to her mother, settling the softly gurgling bundle against one arm the way the wet nurse had shown her. Marcus went through his ritual jigging with absolute gravitas, and by the end, Annia’s mother was helpless with laughter. “What does all that gibberish in the song even mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Marcus confessed, straightening. “Cicero attempted a translation and didn’t make much headway. There’s a line—a corrupted line, I think—that might mean ‘I shall be as a kiss to grief.’”

  Annia’s mother looked at him a moment, and then suddenly pulled him into a hug. “And so you are,” she said softly. “So you are.”

  Annia smiled down into the baby’s blankets. “Can I take Fadilla to the festival? I won’t drop her, I promise!”

  “I’m sure you won’t, because you’re an excellent older sister. But Fadilla stays here.” Faustina took the little bundle back into her arms, another smile lighting her face. Aurelia Fadilla, Annia’s new baby sister, and thank the gods she was thriving. She’d been born first of twins, and the boy who followed lived only an hour.

  That was why Annia’s mother had lain so quiet in her bed this past month.

  “You really should be my brother, you know,” Annia told Marcus later. “My parents adore you.”

  He looked exasperated. “I am not going to be your brother, and that is final!”

  To Annia’s surprise, the rites of the Salii weren’t as ridiculous as she thought. She could pick out Marcus at once among the twelve identically garbed boys. The others were about as nimble as cows, but Marcus went at it with steady grace and a serious expression. He did everything like that, Annia thought, whether it was his lessons, a game of trigon, or an absurd religious ritual. “I want to do things well,” he’d explained to her. “Even if I don’t win.” Annia hadn’t seen the point of doing something well if you weren’t going to win, but maybe Marcus was right after all.

  “Well done, young Verissimus!” the Emperor shouted down, able to applaud now that his arm was well out of its sling, and turned to Marcus’s beaming grandfather. “When I leave on my travels, send me word on how his studies progress. He shows promise.”

  The Salii performed their leaping dances on each successive day, but it was the enormous final banquet at the Temple of Mars that everyone looked forward to. Marcus made a brief appearance, when the boy priests cast their wreaths to the banqueting couch that was supposed to belong to Mars himself (as if a god were going to just drop in for some wine and some roast parrot!), and Marcus’s wreath landed right around the brow of the god’s statue.

  “You did that on purpose,” Annia said when he came sliding out into the garden.

  “I didn’t, I swear!” Marcus took off the silly helmet, now that they were out of sight of all the feasting adults inside. “I hate being the center of attention. I felt silly.”

  “You didn’t look it.” Annia made a jump at an overhanging tree branch, swinging from her hands.

  He tilted his head at her. “Will you let go of that?”

  “Why?” She grinned down at him. “I like being taller than you.” When she turned nine, Marcus had shot up in height suddenly, so his eyes were level with her own.

  Marcus cleared his throat. “Annia, about that boon you owe me—”

  “Watch out,” she groaned, seeing a familiar stocky figure come storming along the twilit path. “It’s Brine-Face.” She dropped down from the branch, but before she could even call out a good insult, Pedanius flattened Marcus with one punch.

  “Get up!” he shouted, and his face was scarlet. “Get up, you prancing ass, you looked like a fool out there. You in your penis helmet—”

  Oh, Hades. Annia went for him, letting out a yell, but Brine-Face turned and shoved her so hard she tumbled off her feet. “Get up!” Pedanius tried to kick Marcus, but Marcus managed to roll out of the way, grabbing Pedanius’s foot. Brine-Face dropped a knee on Marcus’s chest and sent his fist smashing into Marcus’s face again, and Annia saw blood. “You took my place in the Salii, my gra
ndfather said I’d have that place, and the Emperor gave it to you—”

  Marcus’s fist shot upward, and he caught Brine-Face a good clip on the jaw. Annia cheered, scrambling up, but Pedanius just doubled up his own fist and swung again. “What’d you promise the Emperor, Bum-Boy? What’s he giving you next—”

  Annia flung herself on her enemy’s back, locking her arms about his neck, and Marcus took the opportunity to plug a fist into Pedanius’s ribs. Pedanius yelled, and then he yelled again on a higher note when Annia sank her teeth into his ear. That was when she felt a strong hand at her neck.

  “I don’t know who I should I be rescuing here,” an amused voice said. Annia looked up at Antinous, who was trying to look stern and failing as he hauled Annia off Brine-Face and then Brine-Face off Marcus. “Young Pedanius, you seem to be getting the worst of things.”

  “I was not!”

  “Were too,” Marcus mumbled around his bloody lip.

  “I was beating you to a pulp, you sniveling—”

  Annia lunged at Pedanius again. “You’re the one sniveling,” she yelled, as Antinous held her back. “Don’t you dare say we began it this time, you hit my cousin first—”

  “He took my place,” Pedanius snarled, for once too incensed to try to shift the blame. “He took my place with the Emperor!”

  “Easy—” Antinous had Annia by the neck of her dress, but she lashed out with a foot and got Brine-Face square in the knee.

  “See?” Pedanius howled. “She’s a barbarian, she started it—”

  “I did not start it!” Annia shrieked. “You’re always coming at Marcus and me, and someday I am going to make you sorry—”

  “Calm down, Annia.” Antinous ignored the shouting, giving Pedanius a little shake. “I saw you go for them first, you little bully. It’s not how a man of Rome behaves, and you might not have your toga yet but you’re old enough to behave like a man.”

  Annia exhaled furious vindication, but Pedanius just sneered. “You’re not a man at all, just the Emperor’s catamite. Filthy little Greek he likes to fuck—”

  “Don’t you call him that!” Marcus shouted, and Annia pulled her foot back for another kick, but Antinous overrode them. His face was still and hard as a statue, and just as lovely.

  “Call me what you like, boy,” he said quietly. “But do not insult the Emperor.”

  “You don’t dare speak to me that way,” Pedanius bristled. “You’re a whore. And everybody knows he’ll throw you in the gutter with the other whores when you’re too much older, because he only wants young ones sucking his—”

  “Go whine to your grandfather.” Antinous gave him a clip on the ear like swatting a dog, and Brine-Face stumbled back with a yelp. “Don’t insult the Emperor again, and leave off bullying children. Hear me, boy?”

  Pedanius tried to draw himself up proudly as he scurried up the path, but Annia let out a derisive hoot. Antinous gave her a clip on the ear, too. “That’s enough out of you. Taunt a bully, and he’ll just come back for revenge.”

  “Brine-Face always comes back anyway,” Annia stated.

  Antinous looked rather amused at her grim tone. “Why is that?”

  “Gods know,” Marcus said wearily. “I think it’s fated. Pedanius Fuscus against Annia and me—the Greeks against the Trojans—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Annia snorted. “He hates us because you got to join the Salii, and I whacked his hand with a mallet. And because he’s a bullying coward.”

  “I won’t argue about the bullying part,” Antinous agreed. “And I thought he always seemed a nice lad . . .”

  “Everyone thinks that. He puts on a good show.” Annia turned to Marcus. “And if it’s Trojans against Greeks, at least make us the Greeks! The Greeks win!”

  Marcus scowled, and Antinous laughed outright. “Hell’s gates,” he said, and shook his head. “I wouldn’t take on you two brawlers for all the gold in Egypt.”

  “You’re going to Egypt with the Emperor, aren’t you?” Annia felt a wistful pang in her chest.

  “Well, Numidia first. And Parthia, and Judaea. Then Egypt.” Antinous tucked a lock of her hair back behind her ear. “Shall I bring you back an obelisk?”

  “You’d have to bring it in pieces,” Marcus said, ready to start dissecting the technical difficulties of transporting an obelisk. Annia just looked up at Antinous, standing there like a young god, his rich hair catching the lamplight.

  “I’ll miss you,” she blurted out. Antinous coming to pay respects to her father and always taking time to toss a ball with Annia or teach her latrunculi . . . Antinous helping her clean up the latest bowl she’d broken so no one would find the pieces . . . Antinous giving her a wink across the room at boring parties . . .

  “You won’t miss me,” Antinous said lightly. “You’ll be too busy getting tall and beautiful, and when I come back you won’t even remember who I am.”

  If I get tall and beautiful enough, can I marry you? Annia thought. Not that Antinous would ever love anybody but the Emperor. Anybody could see that—it shone out of his face like sunlight.

  “I won’t forget you,” she said instead. “No matter how long you’re gone.”

  “And I’ll think of you every day, little brawler.” Antinous opened his arms to give her a hug. “The very first friend I ever made in Rome. I won’t forget that.”

  Annia hugged him back fiercely. “Promise?”

  “On the River Styx.” He bent down to kiss her cheek. Annia turned her head at the very last moment, so his lips brushed hers.

  “Ha!” she crowed. “So you do kiss girls!”

  “Only the most beautiful ones.” Antinous laughed again, a sound like a ripple of gold coins.

  Marcus looked at Antinous, outraged. “You got my boon!”

  Antinous gave Marcus a man-to-man nod. “She’ll get round to you,” he whispered. “Trust me—just wait a few years.” Annia poked her tongue out at them both, and Antinous grinned. “Come inside, you little gladiators, before you get in any more trouble.”

  “We undertake to be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten by rods”—Annia chanted the gladiator oath, slinging one arm around Marcus and the other around Antinous—“and to die by the sword!”

  “I have no intention of being burned by fire or bound in chains,” Marcus objected. “It sounds most uncomfortable . . . ”

  ANTINOUS

  “Not that one doesn’t appreciate an ecstatic welcome”—Empress Sabina looked out at the men and women of Carthage, cheering in the deluge of rain—“but what have we done to merit it?”

  “There has been no rain to speak of in Carthage for nearly five years,” said Hadrian, and began to reel off the drought’s effect on various varieties of local crops. Of course he had all the facts at his fingertips, Antinous thought with a smile. There seemed to be nothing on earth the Emperor did not know, and yet he was always questing for more. More knowledge, more understanding, more insight—it enchanted Antinous. His own brain was uncomplicated as a cup of water by comparison, and yet it was to him that this restless, complex, insatiable mind kept returning. You have earned the love of a man like this, he reminded himself. That is cause for pride—no matter what rude little boys like Pedanius Fuscus or condescending old men like his grandfather think.

  The Imperial party had only just disembarked in Carthage when the sky opened. Crowds in Rome would have called it a bad omen, but the men and women of Carthage danced and called out Hadrian’s name.

  Antinous couldn’t help it. He took off into the crowd with a whoop, seizing an aged matron by the hands and whirling her in a circle. She beamed and hung a garland about his neck; Antinous kissed her on both cheeks and then found his hands grabbed by a pair of little boys who stood with their mouths open under the rain like a pair of baby birds. He opened his mouth too, and the drops tasted like sweet, cool free
dom. Freedom from Rome; from avid eyes; from disapproving stares and quivering nostrils and sneering voices calling him the Emperor’s he-bitch.

  “Antinous!” Hadrian was shouldering through the crowd after him, half-alarmed and half-laughing as the Carthaginians started to hang garlands on him too. “Bringer of rain!” the call went up. “Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain!”

  “They think I control the rain?” Hadrian asked later, half-amused and half-outraged. “Really. I design walls to contain the Empire; I entirely revitalize the legions; I erect so many new roads and temples that my footsteps might as well spring up marble columns the way Persephone’s were said to spring up flowers. And after all that, I am hailed for a cloudburst?”

  “Acclaim is acclaim,” Empress Sabina pointed out as Antinous brought a towel to drape about the Emperor’s wet curls. She had danced in the rain too, wiggling her toes in the mud—not the Empress of Rome, not the Greek queen in her diadem, but simply a woman enjoying herself, whirling through the raindrops with such glee that she looked no older to Antinous than little Annia.

  “I’d rather be acclaimed for something I actually did,” Hadrian grumbled. “After Carthage we’ll travel to Numidia—I’ll review the legions. Then back across the sea before the autumn storms, to winter in Greece.” Hadrian captured Antinous’s hand in his own. “We can take part in the Mysteries again!”

  “Are you sure?” A thread of anxiety disrupted Antinous’s contentment. He brushed Hadrian’s hair back to feel his forehead—warm, even after the cool drench of the rain outside. Ever since that long stint of bed rest recovering from the broken collarbone, these bouts of sickness seemed to come and go, bringing fevers and spells of nausea . . . And there had been that troubling redness that patched and hardened the skin of his arms so painfully. “There is so much walking at the Mysteries. If you were to have a relapse of fever on the road—”